Zack Gillogly checks the bit machining a replican of the Mars Curiosity Rover at Saunders Machine Works in Zanesville.(Photo: Chris Crook/Times Recorder)

“The Curiosity on Mars is about the size of a car, so much bigger than the one we are building parts for,” Saunders stated.

NASA’s Curiosity is designed to discover Gale Crater on Mars as half of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. It was launched from Cape Canaveral on Nov. 26, 2011, aboard the MSL spacecraft and landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012.

The replica features a Six Wheel Drive System, a fully-functional Rocker-Bogie Suspension System, servo steering, a purposeful differential bar, a 360-degree digicam turret, 3D LIDAR sensing, autonomous habits, radio information transmission — all as per the true Curiosity.

“We are machining the wheels as well as several other parts,” Saunders stated.

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John Saunders holds one of the aluminum Mars Curiosity Rover wheels his firm is machining.(Photo: Chris Crook/Times Recorder)

Four years in the past Saunders, a YouTube star and Zanesville native, returned to his hometown from Manhattan to lift his household.

While working a desk job in Manhattan, Saunders wished to construct a greater rifle goal. Not understanding the place to start out, he dived into coaching movies, absorbing as a lot info as attainable, till he was well-versed within the machining course of.

Saunders stated YouTube was an awesome supply of info when he began machining.

After filming a number of promotional movies to highlight some of the merchandise produced in his machine store, Saunders determined to do a tutorial on machine operation.

Camille and Genevieve Beatty, of Beatty Robotics, proudly exhibiting off their work-in-progress on the primary robotic they constructed, impressed from a Star Wars droid.(Photo: Submitted)

The video was so properly obtained that Saunders continued to provide common YouTube movies. He has now constructed a fan base of greater than 230,000 subscribers.

“I love metalworking, and this channel serves as a way to ‘pay it forward’ to all those who have helped me learn,” Saunders stated.

It is thru his YouTube tutorials that Saunders has constructed a community of enterprise associates increasing the globe, together with his relationship with Beatty Robotics.

Beatty Robotics builds customized robots for museums, science facilities, and aerospace corporations all over the world. Interestingly, the corporate is owned by North Carolina teenage sisters, Camille and Genevieve Beatty, who began the corporate once they have been 11 and 9 years outdated.

Thursday NASA introduced that the Curiosity rover, that has been on Mars for eight years, found natural matter in soil samples taken from three billion-year-old mudstone within the Gale crater. The rover has additionally detected methane within the Martian environment.

The proof, based on a NASA press convention, means that Mars might have supported historic life.

Saunders stated the capabilities of the rover, in addition to robotics normally, are superb.